


As dawn chases night

by Combination_NC



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Angst, Depression, Despair, F/F, Heartache, Loss, Lyrium Addiction, Mania, Possibly Unrequited Love, Substance Abuse, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 11:02:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Combination_NC/pseuds/Combination_NC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not all love stories are joyful ones. But as Thora discovers beneath the Dragonbone Wastes, if you never make your feelings clear you will never know if you could have had one at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As dawn chases night

This is the finish line. This is what you have been heading towards at what others saw as breakneck speed and you an agonising crawl ever since the rumours of signs of life at the hut reached your ears; this eerie mirror with no reflection, hidden away from all life so deep underground, that took your reason to go forwards from you and cannot show you where else to go from here.

The nerves in your arms and legs, back and neck and all insist your entire body is spinning even though you are remaining as still as a person can be while racking with sobs like these. Perhaps it is the lyrium dust in your blood that is making you shake, each tiny particle turning inside you like parts of a blue blizzard, tossing you back and forth and making the world spin from within.

It was only a year, you try to tell yourself. Only one year together, and possibly a year that meant more to you than her. Or perhaps it was less that it meant more to you and more that the meaning was different; you have no doubt it meant much to her, but as far as you will ever know it did not mean the same thing as it did to you. The difference is in how you craved more than the friendship she granted you even though said friendship was as precious as the entire world; how your fingers itched to unpin hair as dark as the cold nights before you descended into the Deep Roads together, eyes ever longing to see it all fall free over pale shoulders. She held the force of the elements at her fingertips, but she never had to use such power to bewitch you. All she had to do was to emerge from the old Warden ruins to walk down that slope in the Korcari Wilds, and at her call you turned around to watch her move with a grace so natural it almost seemed animalistic. It made all the lessons you had been taught as a noblewoman seem a waste, what little hard-earned imitation of grace you had managed to acquire over the years a mockery of this real thing in comparison. It never occurred to you to mourn your own lack of it, not when she had already managed to sink hooks in your heart. You fell for her then, fell harder than you ever thought a person could while still keeping both feet on the ground, and the only way you could get back up was by following her. And follow her you did for an entire year, wearing a flimsy disguise of leadership that never should have been handed to you in the first place as justification. When misfortune dealt you the opportunity you could do little else but take it, and then hide yourself in it for that year. Just one, the most horrible one in memory for most, but if you could live it all again you would.

You would relive the fear you felt while being chased through your homeland by Loghain’s men and darkspawn both, the terror of your first descent into the Deep Roads and the glimpse of what was to come that you caught there. If only you could have her by your side you would face the Anvil of the Void once more to watch horrific Warden-kept secrets be revealed again and again. There is nothing, nothing you would not do to see her again— and so while she was open and honest with her intentions at the end you were the one to betray her, all while feeling the betrayed one was you. 

She might have left you behind, but you never spelt it out in blunt enough words why you needed her to stay or for you to have the permission to follow, and still, still you expected her to know. And because up to that point you could never deny her anything you promised not to follow. Then as the very beat of your heart turned into nothing but a thing counting the time away from her you broke your promise as soon as you had the means to, because after two and a half years you reached the point where you could no longer give her all that she had said she wanted.

Two and a half years, made to feel as long as a life. Two and a half years of leading people while being lost inside your own heart, years spent in the comfort of a keep but longing for that one year lived on the road, cold and hungry and hunted. You might have lived in terror and with the weight of an entire country as a burden on your shoulders, uncountable lives depending on you and the thought of the responsibility of it making you almost choke on the fear of failure at times, and now you carry so much less and yet— it is almost more than you can bear. But back then you had hope, and what do you have now? Sobs shaking your body like a leaf, physical strength forgotten.

You asked in desperation if you would see her again, for what use is there in breathing if you will not spend those breaths counting them down until the time when you will lay eyes on her once more and your heart might know a sliver of peace finally, finally, finally?

 _Not if you are fortunate,_  she had said, two and a half years worth of lonely sadness in her voice but determination in her posture, slim shoulders not nearly as sunk down in  hopelessness as your own, hidden in armour with the rest of your insecurities.

You wanted to tell her that fortune would have been dying on the roof of Fort Drakon, as you were meant to do, free of the weight of your soul forever. Free of all longing and despair and the ever-closer horror of the Calling and its reality of what a woman like yourself might become down there in the deep.  _There is nothing fortunate_ , you wished to tell her,  _about walking this world without you_. But she wanted you to live— oh, she wanted you to live, but for what? For what, and how does one live like this? How does one live without enough hope to keep you afloat, and what use are you now? You have to command because you are what and who you are, as broken a shell of a person as that might be, the lyrium swirling in your blood making you seasick in your endless sorrow, this poisonous dust holding you in this world with its cravings for more.

You try to explain it all to Sigrun who knows what being one of the walking dead is like, but she is still more alive than you; she has her spirit intact and you are a wreck, shipwrecked in yourself and your grief. She so soothingly calls you  _Salroka_  and not Commander, here in front of this cursed mirror you would not break even if you could, because you think if Morrigan walked in then she could just as well walk back out. Out of this wicked thing you pounded your gauntlets against in tearful desperation without causing even the smallest of cracks, this thing that ate the hope for the future that you almost did not know you had before it swallowed her up. For a while you can almost forget about the coming trek back to Vigil’s Keep and how you must still lead once there, and in this moment you are no longer her Commander; you are heartbreak and you are despair, without course or cause, and there is nothing you can do for anyone anymore. You only want, want, want, more consumed with this longing than you ever were with cravings for more lyrium, those tiny blue vials that brings you closer to the Fade, somehow enabling you to ever so slightly touch it, just enough to weave spells of your own to counter the natural magic of others. And when you down those vials and feel the rush of the Fade in your blood you remember how her magic sent ripples underneath your skin, and you mourn. The loss of her, and how what you wanted more than anything might never have been possible in the first place.

You wanted different things; you wanted to scream her name in the night with her tongue too busy elsewhere to call out your own, and her fingers might be able to hold the catalyst for the storm of the century but you wanted to show her what you could do with yours, what other skills you had honed to perfection beside those you would use for battle. But she, she wanted power.  _Love has no meaning_ , she had said.  _Power has meaning_. You did not have enough power at your disposal then, but oh, she mentioned love before you ever did, brought it up like you never dared, and while she claimed it had no meaning with such force in her voice the almost-hidden haunted look in her eyes told you otherwise, so similar to what your own must have looked like every time you were forced to choose the good of all above what you wanted with all your heart. And now when you tried to keep her with you long enough to have her make the choices you never could for you, you still could not get what you wanted and you are not sure if she really left with what she wanted, either.

 _I did not want to see you die_ , she said, but that means something else than _I do not want you to die_.

Because surely you are dying now, the slow agonising passing of someone who has been robbed of hope or reason. If this, with all what never seeing her again means, is supposed to be fortune, you have no idea of what misfortune would be now.

You know you are unfair in your longing because she never promised anything of what you wished for and could not have; the only one who broke any promises was you by coming after her when your heart could not find peace in any other way, making you race after her nearly as quickly as your heart raced at the sight of her. The only way to move on and elsewhere now would be to tear said heart out, and you suppose misfortune would be failing to do so.

She does not want you as you are now, and so you must leave her alone as you would the handmaiden who did not return your smiles, just as you have done before. That is why she walked through the mirror without you chasing after even though you are like the dawn that chases night, so relentlessly because it is in its nature. You will never not wish you could have followed, but with Morrigan not finding you strong enough for her to take along with her there was nothing else you could have done. She never said it was not love, only that love had no meaning when compared to power; power you lacked, but you will always believe some manner of love was there. All those late nights spent in front of a dying fire she could have so easily kept alive but instead chose to watch fade with you, facing the dark together. You talked so closely and with such passion that the thought of how said passion would play out when acted by more of your bodies than tongues made your head spin. Now it is spinning with too much lyrium in place of the rush of love, and you think of how you have wrecked everything. Soon you will no longer be ruled by the heart that pumps your blood around but the lyrium surging within your veins and one day all that will matter is getting more of it and its song. You do not know whether to welcome it or not; despite all its horrors and desperate delusions, it would at least not be this.

You came for answers, you said, and so you did, but you never dared to ask her the questions you most wanted the answers to. Did she ever know? Did she ever notice what all these things meant to you? If you had told her back then, what would she have done?

 _Salroka_ , Sigrun says as she strokes your hair with gentle hands, so different from those that used to braid it for you near the end of that blighted year. Those were purposeful and efficient and did not linger nearly as often as you wished they would, but linger on occasion they did, and it fuelled your desperate hope beyond reason. And because your hope was the tinder for the guiding light you have been following these lonely years, now burnt long enough to burn out, here you are collapsed with your head in Sigrun’s lap, her hand in your hair and voice so soothing in your ear, sounding a word meant for friends.

It is what she always calls you, but even this friendly endearment is beginning to sound like a title to your weary ears because no one ever calls you by your name anymore. If you know how to long for anything other than Morrigan, what you long for is some measure of familiarity, some indication that someone remembers who you are and not only what you have done. But what you did was so large, larger than any person could ever be, and so all they see is the deed and the hero while you only want to be the person beyond the impossible feat, because you are not able to live up to the image of the hero they have painted themselves in their mind’s eye.

 _Salroka_ , your friend repeats,  _let’s go home_ , and you nod your yes into her lap. Only to you, home is even deeper down in the dark deep, where you can scream your lungs out in its endless imitation of the night.

**Author's Note:**

> Previously posted to tumblr and originally written in January, while I was still deep in mourning. A huge thank you to MsBarrows and Hawkeward, for their help with beta and all encouragement. Without them, I would not have had the courage to post this.


End file.
